Monday, July 02, 2012
Between a Rock and a Soft Place July 2012
The 'Kabobolator' on the left was supposed to be a kabbob grill. Mosaic tiles later and it's a 'kabobulator'
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This might be a good time to admit I don't cook. I used to, did so for 20 years and sometimes even enjoyed it, but now my creativity is elsewhere and my husband, John, has taken over with far more gusto than I ever had. I saw it as a chore, he sees it as an art. He's empassioned by curries and Morrocan tagines and, most recently, Turkish grills which he marinates in his collection of spices. When I travel, I bring back textiles; he brings back spices, spoons, pots. I go to textile and yarn stores, he heads for kitchen shops or to grill a chef about baking techniques. You shoud see him communing about grilling with Moroccans, Turks, Italians, and the guy who bakes our pizza down the street.
For a long time he's dreamed of a fabulous outdoor kitchen with a fireplace, an Italian bake oven, a pond, and a Turkish Kabob grill (kabobulator) which would cost a fortune and therefore seemingly not possible. Ah, but he poked around junk yards and surplus yards, scraping up bits and pieces for a fraction of the cost—old sinks, slabs of granite, things nobody else saw a use for. He dug out the rock and dirt compacting our front-yard-that-wasn't, hardscaped the perimeter, poured concrete and laid stone. He's very, very good with stone, a bit of a local legend, actually. The photos you see are fresh today and the everything in the photos was done by him single-handedly. Now he's laying the flagstone.
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Work in progress
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Can you blame me for getting excited? By the end of the summer, we'll be sitting on the patio sipping iced tea and knitting (me, not him. He'll be drinking beer and scheming up his next project). The bake oven will probably be completed by the end of August and he hopes the fireplace, too, tough he forgets we'll be off to Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Turkey by then.The only thing that draws him away from this creation is to make and pack the kits, something he takes very seriously. I, apparently, don't pack them well enough whereas he practically engineres them!
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I'll post more photos as the hard space continues to evolve…